Project MUSE®: Hopscotch: A Cultural Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Hopscotch: A Cultural Review.daily12026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1, no. 3 (1999);
v. 2 (2000/01)Latest Articles: Hopscotch: A Cultural ReviewTWOProject MUSE®Hopscotch: A Cultural Review1527-800x1098-6995Latest articles in Hopscotch: A Cultural Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®In the Name of Salome (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13137
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The two protagonists of this novel, Dominican national poet Salomé Ureña and her Cuban-raised daughter, Salomé Camila Henríquez Ureña, ask about the strength of the heart: “Is love stronger than anything else in the world?” Several epic love stories cry out for attention in Julia Alvarez’s new biographical novel: love for one’s country and one’s family (the fatherland and the paterfamilias); love for poetry and the flesh that inhabits it; love of beauty and idealism. With each love, of course, comes a unique betrayal.
The love for one’s country can be a painful long-distance relationship. Salomé Ureña’s father leaps in and out of exile, depending on whether the “blues” or the “reds” are in power
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallIn the Name of Salome (review)2001-10-01text/htmlen-USIn the Name of Salome (review)2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®66842026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01Interviews/Entrevistas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13138
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Gloria Anzaldúa began to menstruate when she was three months old. This may seem odd, but for Anzaldúa it isn’t. All of her life she has straddled the transitions by which most of us define our lives: childhood to adulthood, innocence to sexual awareness, ignorance to wisdom. The child of sharecroppers in South Texas, Anzaldúa—a person of color, a woman, sexually ambiguous, poor, uneducated as a child, unredeemable—never fit into easy categories. Ambitious and aided by a prodigious intellect, she became an eminent epistemologist, able to approach ideas freely, without regard for taboos.
Interviews/Entrevistas covers the years 1982 to 1999. The conversations collected in it are tough going. Since
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallInterviews/Entrevistas2001-10-01text/htmlen-USInterviews/Entrevistas2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®68142026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01Jesus: A Yiddish tale from Cuba
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13139
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Many Latin American republics—most notably, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay—fostered a significant Yiddish-language literature and press, starting with the arrival of eastern European Jews in the 1880s and continuing through the first half of the twentieth century. (Yiddish, spoken by the Jews of eastern Europe and their descendants, is a Germanic language written with Hebrew letters and enriched with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic, and Romance vocabularies.) In the last decade, interest in Jewish identity in Latin America has grown, as evidenced by such works as Naomi Lindstrom’s Jewish Issues in Argentine Literature and the anthology Tropical Synagogues, compiled by Ilan Stavans. And let us not forget the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallJesus: A Yiddish tale from Cuba2001-10-01text/htmlen-USJesus: A Yiddish tale from Cuba2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®468472026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01John Wayne, Person and Persona: The love affairs of an American legend
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13140
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How does reel life compare with real life? John Wayne had three wives, all of them Latinas. This is but one of the complexities and apparent contradictions of a motion picture actor who came to symbolize America.
Wayne was a man whose millions of fans the world over included Nikita Khrushchev, who when visiting the United States in 1959 had two requests: to visit Disneyland and meet Wayne. On his visit to the United States in 1975, the emperor Hirohito of Japan asked to meet him, although Wayne claimed, with typical humor, that he had probably killed more Japanese in his war movies than the entire U.S. Army had during World War II. And, although they were far apart politically, President Jimmy
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallJohn Wayne, Person and Persona: The love affairs of an American legend2001-10-01text/htmlen-USJohn Wayne, Person and Persona: The love affairs of an American legend2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®316542026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01The Morrows in Mexico: A pictorial essay
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13142
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Dwight W. Morrow (1873–1931) served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico for only a brief time in the late 1920s. But during his tenure a radical shift took place in Mexican-American relations. Credited as the first modern diplomat from the United States to develop a deep appreciation of Mexican culture, Morrow was especially fond of handicrafts—old pieces of lacquerware from Olinalá, large ceramic pots from Guerrero and Oaxaca, and colorful Talavera tiles from Puebla. Soon after arriving in Mexico, he and his wife, the writer Elizabeth Cutter Morrow (1873–1955), built a modest weekend retreat in Cuernavaca and filled it with their growing collection of Mexican crafts. The adobe-walled house, known as Casa Mañana
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallThe Morrows in Mexico: A pictorial essay2001-10-01text/htmlen-USThe Morrows in Mexico: A pictorial essay2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®169552026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01The Poetics of Advocacy: Three Poems
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13143
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I am a lawyer. I have not practiced for eight years, since I left the law to teach poetry. Once I was the supervisor of Su Clínica Legal, a legal services program for low-income Spanish-speaking tenants in greater Boston; now I am a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Yet I have kept my license to practice law, because a lawyer never really stops being a lawyer. Someone always needs advice about the quotidian disasters lawyers know so well: jail, eviction, divorce. But the lawyer is in the poems, too. Both as a lawyer and as a poet, I have performed the role of advocate. This is a natural act for me. Others may see such an act as presumptuous, but consider
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallThe Poetics of Advocacy: Three Poems2001-10-01text/htmlen-USThe Poetics of Advocacy: Three Poems2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®217692026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01A Tale of Two Cities
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13144
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This July of 1942, the people of Istanbul were saying, was one of the hottest in living memory. Around Sultan Ahmet Square, where the Blue Mosque and the Byzantine monuments faced each other in historical debate, the traditional çayhanes had appropriated every patch of shade. The patrons of these teahouses blamed the heat on Seytan: the land was fragrant with the verses and compositions of the young bards, and the Archdemon, jealous of the Turk’s ability to turn all matter into poetry or music, was venting his resentment. The narghile smokers, mostly pious men revered as guardians of the faith, disagreed: such temperatures occurred only when sainted imams lamented the profanation of Koranic law, and, under
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallA Tale of Two Cities2001-10-01text/htmlen-USA Tale of Two Cities2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®540232026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01Fear and Loathing in Ecuador
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13145
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In August 1999 artist Douglas Fishbone mounted an interactive installation in the Banco Central in Cuenca, Ecuador, that consisted of a mound of about twenty-five thousand bananas. The bananas were piled up in the center of the bank’s plaza and then given away to the crowd; within an hour the work had vanished completely.
Fishbone got the idea from a similar mound of bananas he saw for sale by the roadside at the marketplace in Cuenca. As a purely organic and unintentional work of sculpture, this pile, in texture and color, was strangely beautiful. Fishbone wanted the installation to be a critique of globalization. Its main visual reference was to the mountains of stolen Jewish possessions amassed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallFear and Loathing in Ecuador2001-10-01text/htmlen-USFear and Loathing in Ecuador2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®43352026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01On Cuban Film: A brief history in four easy lessons
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13146
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In a chronicle published in the Sunday edition of El Diario de la Marina on 24 January 1897, Jacobo Domínguez Santí commented how, on the outskirts of Havana’s Parque Central, Gabriel Veyre had introduced to the public the Lumière brothers, universally acclaimed champions of the kinescope. Veyre had arrived at the Cuban capital from Mexico City and for a few weeks had enthralled his audiences with such short films as El tren, El regador y el muchacho, El sombrero cómico, and Partida de cartas. A few weeks later, on 13 February, on the ancient esplanade in front of the Louvre, facing the Parque Central, Edison’s Vitascope—featuring a machine that, according to the chronicles of the time, projected living pictures
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallOn Cuban Film: A brief history in four easy lessons2001-10-01text/htmlen-USOn Cuban Film: A brief history in four easy lessons2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®200582026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01Sirena Selena (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13147
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When his grandmother dies, young Sirenito has no one and nothing to raise him but the Puerto Rican backstreets. He’s adopted by Valentina Frenesí, a drag whore from San Juan, who teaches him to suck and to snort before she ODs on smack. He is then taken in by Martha Divine, a pre-operative transsexual, who knows she can raise the cash necessary to chop off her organ only if she turns Sirenito into “Sirenita.” Divine sells the boy to the ritzy resorts as a transvestite entertainer.
Readers who trust that Mayra Santos-Febres has contrived a funky little fusion of soap opera and grit are right—for the first fifty pages or so. In the opening chapters she captures the squalor of San Juan and narrates
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallSirena Selena (review)2001-10-01text/htmlen-USSirena Selena (review)2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®38852026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01You Can't Say "Ain't" in Spanish--Or Can You?: A conversation with Gregory Rabassa
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13148
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You’ve often been quoted as saying that your successful translating career “was serendipity all the way.” In light of all your book-length translations, do you still feel this way? Has there ever been a moment while you were translating a work when you felt you had somehow been led to do this often underappreciated and thankless work?
As I look back, I can still say that it all just happened. I suppose that this is what takes place if one goes along in life expecting either everything or nothing, without any rigid plans except where to sleep the night. A year, or even a day, before I began translating, I never thought I would end up so deeply in it. I did have some thoughts about writing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallYou Can't Say "Ain't" in Spanish--Or Can You?: A conversation with Gregory Rabassa2001-10-01text/htmlen-USYou Can't Say "Ain't" in Spanish--Or Can You?: A conversation with Gregory Rabassa2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®402842026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01Viva La Independencia!
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13149
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For Jaime Permuth, the project of an extended journey through Mexico did not evolve from an intellectual preoccupation. It was driven by a personal need to return to that country’s everyday life and popular culture. Although he had grown up in Guatemala, Permuth had traveled far and wide through Mexico, always in a state of wonder and expectation. At the close of the twentieth century, having spent the last decade of it in New York City, he felt the urge to revisit Mexico and his memories of it. Would his adult self encounter, across time, the child he had been? What kind of dialogue would the two selves establish, and what images would result? How had Mexico changed?
Before he left New York City
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallViva La Independencia!2001-10-01text/htmlen-USViva La Independencia!2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®56442026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01She-Calf and Other Quechua Folk Tales (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13150
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Inasmuch as there is never a one-to-one correlation between one language and another, to translate is to transform, and each word requires an interpretive decision on the part of the translator. A more honest term for translation is the one used in oral communication: interpretation. This term is aptly applied to Johnny Payne’s work in She-Calf and Other Quechua Folk Tales.
Payne’s own experience as a storyteller of sorts provides him with the sensitivity to recognize each storyteller’s art in these tales. His brief, informative introduction, a story in and of itself, acknowledges the storyteller’s desire to engage in a form of self-expression that cannot be encased in the label of “informant.”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallShe-Calf and Other Quechua Folk Tales (review)2001-10-01text/htmlen-USShe-Calf and Other Quechua Folk Tales (review)2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®58302026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01Itinerant Subirats: A cybercafe discussion
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13151
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It is fitting that my first encounter with Eduardo Subirats came via e-mail. He is a globetrotting public intellectual committed to cautioning society about what he considers the nonpersonal forms of existence found in high-tech tyranny and in the culture of simulacra. Resulting from the crisis of modern reason, these developments gradually force us to lose our individuality and historical memory.
In El continente vacío: La conquista del Nuevo Mundo y la conciencia moderna, Subirats offers a new reading of the conquest of America. His study is not limited to finding the roots of Eurocentric reason but also examines its devastating effects. Subirats is also known for his discussions of aesthetics
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallItinerant Subirats: A cybercafe discussion2001-10-01text/htmlen-USItinerant Subirats: A cybercafe discussion2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®326602026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01The Postman and the Mex: From hard-boiled to huevos rancheros in detective fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13152
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[Sidebar]
Or, and this he didn’t like to admit even to himself, perhaps he had become a private investigator because in his daydreams he saw himself as a hero.
Girl meets boy. Girl and boy murder girl’s husband. Girl and boy destroy each other.
If James M. Cain’s Postman Always Rings Twice did not create this essential formula, it certainly planted it in the collective consciousness of hundreds of writers who have followed him down the mean streets of crime fiction. This classic noir novel—indeed, some call it a classic American novel—was published in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression and turbulent social unrest. Its bleak, fatalistic point of view and laconic style
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallThe Postman and the Mex: From hard-boiled to huevos rancheros in detective fiction2001-10-01text/htmlen-USThe Postman and the Mex: From hard-boiled to huevos rancheros in detective fiction2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®273632026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01Chicano Mysteries: A shortlist
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13153
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[Return to Article]
Rudolfo Anaya: His mysteries feature Sonny Baca, an Albuquerque private eye whose cases usually require invocation of spiritual traditions and reliance on cultural truths: Alburquerque (1992), Zia Summer (1995), Río Grande Fall (1996), Shaman Winter (1999).
Lucha Corpi: Her sleuth is Gloria Damasco, a strong Chicana who often uses her ability to “see” into the future: Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992), Cactus Blood (1995), Black Widow’s Wardrobe (1999).
Rolando Hinojosa-Smith: He is a classic Chicano writer who sets his crime novels in mythical Belken County, Texas, a landscape filled with characters and drama that have been compared to Faulkner’s: Partners
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallChicano Mysteries: A shortlist2001-10-01text/htmlen-USChicano Mysteries: A shortlist2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®41212026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13154
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In this book Suzanne Jill Levine explores the Argentinean novelist Manuel Puig’s early life in terms of his fiction and the movies that influenced him. Her discussion offers, first, an entertaining excursion through American, French, German, and Italian film history. Reflecting Manuel’s own delight in gossip, it is full of tantalizing tidbits of information about screen legends. Levine also does a remarkable job of tracing the psychological importance of movies as an escape for Manuel from the bleak existence that awaited him as a cultured homosexual in the macho-infused backwater of the Pampas. She reconstructs the relationship between Manuel and his mother, Malé, in terms of his immersion in the world of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallManuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (review)2001-10-01text/htmlen-USManuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (review)2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®70572026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01Isabel Allende, Fortune's Daughter
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13155
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Since the death of her twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Paula Frias, in December 1992, Isabel Allende has frequently stated that she is a “changed” woman. Evidently, the struggle to save Paula—who suddenly fell ill in 1991, slipped into a coma, and died twelve months later from a rare immune deficiency disease (porphyria)—deepened Allende.
My own interviews with Allende before and after Paula’s death confirm this perception. I have found her a noticeably different woman—more reflective, less goal-directed, more self-revealing, less guarded—from the writer I knew when we taught together at the University of Virginia in the late 1980s. She also told me in a May 1995 interview that her grief over
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallIsabel Allende, Fortune's Daughter2001-10-01text/htmlen-USIsabel Allende, Fortune's Daughter2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®258362026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13156
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In this book Mike Davis, who teaches at the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York, sets himself the task of placing Latinos “in the center of the debate about the future of the American city.” To do so, he provides us with up-to-date demographic research of the North American population of Latin American descent, especially of those living in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. As the book progresses, Davis swerves from giving statistical data to providing flesh-and-blood examples to support his assertions. On this basis Davis critiques the socioeconomic conditions of Latinos, the role of politicians in the overall perception of this group, and the impact of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallMagical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City (review)2001-10-01text/htmlen-USMagical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City (review)2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®45602026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01Of Books as Merchandise: A conversation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13157
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Let us begin by giving each of our two novelists, Jorge Volpi from Mexico and Edmundo Paz Soldán from Bolivia, the opportunity to speak for a few minutes about the genesis of their two most recent novels, En busca de Klingsor and Río fugitivo.
One of the things that most surprised me was the critical reception of the novel, first in Spain and then in Latin America. Critics have reacted to the book as something of an oddity within the tradition of Latin American literature, and particularly in Mexican narrative. And this has to do as well with its genesis. Cabrera Infante, when he spoke of the novel, said that it was a German novel written in Spanish and that it formed part of a literary tradition
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallOf Books as Merchandise: A conversation2001-10-01text/htmlen-USOf Books as Merchandise: A conversation2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®246682026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01Javier Marias: An appreciation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13158
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V.S. Pritchett, whose essays are an invaluable companion, a sort of Dante’s Virgil for navigating modern literature, once described Don Quixote as “the novel that killed a country by knocking the heart out of it and extinguishing its belief in itself forever.” This is no doubt an incisive statement, and perhaps truthful too. If so, it should be expanded to say that the novel also artfully extirpated Spain from Europe’s intellectual conscience. For beyond Cervantes, where are its influential figures to be found in the international sphere? This is not to say that Spain has given up on literature. On the contrary, tens of thousands of books (nonfiction, poetry, and as much fiction as mushrooms spring up in a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/73/image/coversmallJavier Marias: An appreciation2001-10-01text/htmlen-USJavier Marias: An appreciation2001-10-012001TWOProject MUSE®180982026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002001-10-01